Archive for February 2009

Daniel Shain rounds up 10 Excellent Open Source and Free Alternatives to Photoshop in a post on the Six Revisions blog. Here are few from the list that I hadn’t heard of before but can’t wait to check out.

• Krita
• ChocoFlop
• Cinepaint
• Pixia
• Pixen

Sarah Evans, Director of Communications at Elgin Community College (ECC) in Elgin, Illinois writes about Social Media for Business: The Dos & Don’ts of Sharing. In this helpful article on Mashable, Evans provides a guide for organizations interested in effectively developing their brand on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. The post is divided into the following categories:

• Be transparent and authentic. Be human.
• A profile pic is worth a thousand tweets
• Leaving a legacy
• Don’t be a social schizo
• Social climbing not the best approach
• It’s not a one-stop shop
• Return on engagement
• Best advice? Don’t take anyone else’s advice

If you’re a freelancer, student, or just in the job market right now, a portfolio website showcasing your past work can really give you an advantage. Smashing Magazine has put together a top-notch guide to 10 Steps To The Perfect Portfolio Website. The article details the elements your website must have as well as provides screenshots of 40+ beautiful personal portfolio websites. Check out the full article for more on these ten recommendations for a portfolio website:

1. Logo
2. Tagline
3. Portfolio
4. Services
5. About me
6. Contact
7. Blog
8. Call to action
9. Use social networking websites
10. Language and communication

And if you are actively looking for a job, you may want to check out Mashable’s Top 10 Social Sites for Finding a Job posted earlier this week.

Speaking expert Olivia Mitchell guest posts at Pistachio about How to Present While People are Twittering. This timely article discusses how the conference back channel can work for you, and is a must-read for those speakers preparing for conference season. the post is divided into the following sections:

• Benefits of the back channel to the audience
• What about the speaker?
• Managing the back channel

Also, for those still getting up and running on Twitter, Derek Halpern at Prevential has created an Ultimate Twitter resource guide organized into chapters of useful links and articles pertaining to the popular microblogging application.

• Chapter 1: Twitter for Newbies
• Chapter 2: How to Use Twitter Effectively
• Chapter 3: How to Increase Your Twitter Followers
• Chapter 4: Why Twitter Helps Bloggers (and How they Can Use It)
• Chapter 5: The Ultimate Guide to Twitter for Business
• Chapter 6: Here are the Best Twitter Marketing Resources… Period
• Chapter 7: Does Twitter Provide Any SEO Benefits?
• Chapter 8: Where Else Does Twitter Apply?
• Chapter 9: Twitter Case Studies: What are People and Companies Doing?
• Bonus Chapter: More Twitter Tips

The folks at the Common Craft Show have created a new “in plain English” video detailing the basics about such computer hardware as hard drives, RAM, and processors.

John Dupuis, Head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library at York University in Toronto has compiled a list of Twenty-nine reports about the future of academic libraries. All of the reports are freely available. Here are just a few, be sure and check out the full post for more:

• A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States
• Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space
• Finding Context: What Today’s College Students Say About Conducting Research in the Digital Age

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Social media guru Chris Brogan offers speaking advice in his latest post, Make Better Presentations - The Anatomy of a Good Speech. If you have an upcoming presentation, you may want to stop by and check out these tips:

• Start with WIIFM
• What Is the Goal of a Presentation?
• Use a Framework of Some Kind
• Inspiration for Great Speeches
• Shop Your Work
• How I’ve Been Doing It

The folks at Ten23 Software have published a 37-page guide called Building PhotoKast: Creating an iPhone app in one month . This free resource is chock full of useful tips and recommendations for everything from design concept to monetization strategies.

And if you need help creating an iPhone application for your blog, you can check out my previous post How to Create a Mobile Website for Your Blog in which I list the tools that I used to create the iLibrarian iPhone application.

via Mashable

Peter Bromberg at Library Garden discusses privacy issues in light of the recent Facebook TOS controversy in What Libraries Can Learn from Facebook.

“We know all this, and we personally experience the benefits, but librarians still seem generally loathe to let our customers share their personal information in exchange for anything. We don’t just protect customer privacy, we paternalistically protect it from the customers themselves, rendering them childlike. Our privacy philosophy often reduces down to, “We know better”, or “You can’t be trusted with that–you’ll hurt yourself.”"

Brian Mathews, User Experience Librarian at Georgia Institute of Technology, writes Web Design Matters: Ten essentials for any library site for the most recent issue of Library Journal. The article details ten key elements which will update and improve your library’s website, and provides helpful examples for each. Here are his first five recommendations, be sure and read the full article for more:

1. Promotion
2. Segmentation
3. Visual Cues
4. Inspiring Photos
5. Search Boxes

via Tame the Web

Cameron Chapman at Mashable presents a mega guide to 60+ Great How To Sites and Resources. If you’re looking for guidance in a particular area, you’ll want to check out some of these resources which are divided into the following categories:

• General How-to
• Technology How-To
• Productivity and Efficiency How-To
• Business and Career How-To
• Mashable How-Tos
• Miscellaneous How-To

In response to user outcry regarding their revised Terms of Service, Facebook yielded last night to the wisdom of their members. According to a post by Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog, the social network has reverted back to their previous TOS while they consider new language for the next version. And to develop the new Terms, they are asking users for input through the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities group, which already has over 34,000 members.

Cameron Moll at Authentic Boredom presents a guide to better conference speaking, providing detailed suggestions based on his own experiences over the last four years as a public speaker. The article’s guidelines are broken down into the following sections:

• Preparation
• Equipment
• On Stage: The Presentation
• On Stage: Q&A

Facebook revised its Terms of Service earlier this month, causing much uproar among users including blacked-out avatars and a Fade to Blank protest group. The crux of the issue is that the new TOS states that all of the content uploaded to the social network can be used, published, licensed, sublicensed, etc. in perpetuity by Facebook…even if the member quits the network. Here is an excerpt:

“You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.”

To find out more about what’s being said, check out these sources:
NYT: Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information

Mashable: Facebook Responds to Concerns Over Terms of Service

Chris Brogan: Wake Up to How You Share on the Web

Mashable: Facebook: All Your Stuff is Ours, Even if You Quit

Facebook blog: On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information

Fade to Blank Facebook TOS Protest Group

#fadetoblank to discuss protest on Twitter

Jason Fitzpatrick at Lifehacker lists the Five Best Movie Cataloging Tools for those interested in keeping tabs on their collections. Be sure and read the full article for details about cost, features, and screenshots of these and more apps:

1. Delicious Library
2. DVD Profiler
3. Collectorz Movie Collector